In the case of optical communication with data rates in the range of Gbit/s via an optical waveguide, the fiber dispersion is decisive for the bridgeable link length. This also applies, in particular, in the wavelength window around 1.55 .mu.m, since here the attenuation can be eliminated by means of optical amplifiers, while the dispersion of a standard fiber has very large positive values at approximately 17 ps/nm/km. There is therefore an interest in components which have a negative dispersion and can thus form a dispersion-free transmission medium in conjunction with the standard fiber. For very broadband applications such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), it would also be desirable, moreover, to be able to compensate the rise (approximately 0.06 ps/nm.sup.2 /km at 1.55 .mu.m) in the dispersion of the standard fiber. Moreover, components can be of interest which have a dispersion which is variable (including in sign), in order to be able to compensate, for example, the residual dispersion of a dispersion-shifted fiber at the transmitter wavelength.
The use of passive, linear principles is interesting for dispersion compensation since, so long as no nonlinear effects occur in the transmission, they permit the use of compensation components at any desired location on the optical transmission link. In the case of the passive principles in particular, there is also the prospect of cost-effective and compact components.
Apart from dispersion-compensating fibers (also currently commercially available), various components have already been presented in conjunction with dispersion compensation: Fabry-Perot interferometers, ring resonators, cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometers, cascaded birefringent crystals, free-beam optical systems with gratings, and chirped gratings.